Contents

Overview

When you point your konqueror to fish://user@target, the fish kioslave opens a process that calls the executable ssh. If a password is needed, this question is passed on to you (search for "password" in fish.cpp). Then a perl script is copied over to the target host and executed there. On the target host, the file is named .fishsrv.pl. This perl script is compiled into your binary kio_fish.o. If you want to change it sustainably, you will have to change fish.pl in your source dir and then compile and install the directory kioslave/fish.

The perl script, running on the target computer, is (t)here to execute fish commands like LIST, STAT, WRITE and APPEND. They are sent from fish.cpp running on the source computer.

Bugs

Test case

If you want a test case to get some debugging output from kio_fish, get a fresh checkout of kdebase. There you find a test case in runtime/kioslave/fish/tests. I had the problem that the STOR commands from the fish kioslave were not logged as long as I had localhost as target computer. When I changed it to my local address (192.168.0.7), it worked.

Logging

You may want to switch on logging for fish.cpp and for fish.pl.

In this example, we want to log the output of fish.cpp to /tmp/debugfish. As described at Debugging_IOSlaves, change your kdebugrc, e.g. like that:

In this example, we want to log the output of fish.pl to /tmp/kio_fish.debug.log so we change the 14th line of fish.pl to

open(DEBUG,">>/tmp/kio_fish.debug.log");

and uncomment all the lines containing DEBUG.

Manually testing fish

To test fish manually, call ~/.fishsrv.pl. The fish server will ask you in friendly words (it says ### 100) to transmit its own code, followed by a line __END__. Transmit it. Then the fish server is ready to talk with you (it says ### 200). You can have a conversation like this: